


Quarantine

by SpookyGibson



Category: Rizzoli & Isles
Genre: AU, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-02
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:53:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 20,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23448835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpookyGibson/pseuds/SpookyGibson
Summary: In 2010 Jane is on the hunt for a serial killer, a hitman to be correct, when a virus breaks loose and she finds herself quarantined.
Relationships: Maura Isles & Jane Rizzoli, Maura Isles/Jane Rizzoli
Comments: 39
Kudos: 57





	1. Prologue

This was Jane´s first case as lead agent. The first case she had full responsibility for. Considering her high rate of solved cases, and how quickly she had worked her way up in the agency, this day had been long overdue. The only reason she had had to wait so much longer to be given these responsibilities was because, unlike her male colleagues, she wasn’t a man. But this case was supposed to change everything. Now it was her time to prove herself and move up on the career ladder. Jane was extremely grateful that the case required a female agent, in the event that they needed to get closer to the hitman without arousing suspicion. Nobody in the agency wanted to tip off their target and actually reveal that they were surveying every move the suspect made. Afterall, they were looking for one of the deadliest hitmen of the decade.

Jane arrived at Heathrow Airport, London on a gloomy January morning. She was already tired from the long journey she had just had but knew it was nowhere near over. With her two large suitcases in tow, she pulled out a small piece of paper that had been given to her during the briefing she had had at the headquarters in Langley two days before her departure, pulling it up to her face, eyes squinting in the dim light. She could barely make out the scribbled handwriting, not that it would be any help if she could read it as the directions were minimal. With a deep sigh, she grabbed her bags and headed in the direction she hoped was first on the paper.

Jane had used the flight to read over the casefile, crammed into the window seat of the plane and making sure only she could see the file. Briefing herself again had turned out to be easier than she had expected as both of her seat neighbours had fallen asleep shortly after dinner had been served. The information Jane had was scarce. The files were comprised of thirty cases. Thirty murders, ten in the US and twenty scattered across Europe. The only link between each victim was that they all had connections to the mob, there was no evidence left on the bodies and a small golden cross, one that could be found on a necklace, was discovered within the mouth of each corpse. Before Jane and her team had discovered the mob connection they had been on the hunt for a serial killer, however now all the pieces pointed towards a hired hitman. The killings in the US had been going on for two years before Jane´s supervisors finally admitted defeat and asked for help from other agencies. Desperate for any new leads they had requested to be informed of any killings that had the same signature, the small golden cross. After the request for help had gone out, it hadn’t been long before Interpol responded. Jane’s team received the twenty cases that had accumulated across the same time span within Europe. After, days of persuasion and to Jane’s utter frustration, Interpol eventually divulged the believed location of where the hitman was currently residing. As reluctant Interpol had been to actually share valuable information with the American intelligence they had failed to collect any bulletproof evidence to solidify their suspicions. With cases piling up and agents being strapped they had no other choice than to hand the surveillance over to the CIA.

Red-eye flights were the worst, at least in Jane´s opinion. She had always been unable to sleep on a plane. Only managing to doze off here and there. Unfortunately, she had no choice. After all most flights to Europe just happened to be overnight. Jane knew the jetlag would kill her, but she hoped that if she could just stay awake long enough and then go to sleep early on her first day in London it would not be that bad. Deciding that she deserved it, Jane ordered a whiskey with her dinner and found it had made her tired. With her eyes drooping, she closed the casefile, plugged her headphones into the in seat entertainment screen and picked a movie. Two hours of reading and rereading the notes had to be enough to prepare her for the first few days of her assignment.

Immigration at the airport had not taken as long as she had expected. Only knowing the extensively long queues for international arrivals at JFK, LAX and Logan Airport, Jane had expected her immigration to the UK to take much longer than the 20 minutes it had taken her to get to the officer and have her papers checked. Finding her way to the tube had proven to be more demanding and confusing. Jane was extraordinarily glad when she finally slumped into an empty seat, holding onto her suitcase tightly, with her laptop bag balanced on her lap. Jane was tired and her body ached, but she decided she could not stand being cramped inside the overcrowded tube anymore. She was utterly fed up of public transport, so she decided to walk the short distance to Lambeth. The fresh air would do her some good and it couldn’t be that hard to find her way to the apartment she was meant to spend the next couple of months in. After all she had a phone and a map.

Stepping into the dark morning, she inhaled deeply, enjoying the feel of the cold air in her lungs. Winter in the UK was truly different to the winters she was used to in the US. There was no snow and the air was missing the prickle of ice she knew and loved.


	2. A Mysterious Blonde

When Maura returned from her business trip, she could immediately tell that somebody had moved into the apartment next door. It had not been the new name on the letterbox downstairs, but the updated peephole that looked nothing like the old scratched one that had previously been there, along with the newly cleaned hallway in front of the opposite door. Making a mental note to figure out who J Maldonado was, she unlocked her own front door and pushed her carry-on inside.

Closing the door behind her, she stripped out of her clothes, not being able to wait to get out of them a second longer. She wrapped her arms around the growing pile and took them into the bathroom with her. The blonde hated clutter, she hated it when people left their things wherever they pleased, and she hated the way traveling made her feel. Unfortunately, her occupation meant she usually spend about two weeks every couple of months in a different city or country. Spending the next half an hour in the shower, Maura reminisced on her successful trip. But every time she closed her eyes, the new name on the letterbox next to hers popped into her mind.

The apartment next door had been empty for the past 6 months and to see it suddenly occupied raised her suspicions. Who had so suddenly moved in? Why had the apartment not been rented until now? The apartment building she was living in was nice, nothing too luxurious but it was a well-kept building, with beautiful big apartments. Yes, the rent was a bit high but living in London and close to the city centre was pricey. Stepping out of the shower, she wrapped her body into a silk robe and returned to her suitcase. Unpacking and tidying after herself quickly before she sat down at the kitchen table and opened her laptop. Maura opened her browser and typed "J Maldonado" into the search bar.

50 seconds later her head sank into her hands and she groaned, wet hair framing her delicate features as little droplets of water discoloured the wooden top of the table. Over 54 million search results had popped up in front of her, one of them being for a musical artist. At least him she could exclude, Maura thought with a dry laugh as she looked up and refocused her eyes on the screen. Google would definitely not be the answer to her question. It seemed like she had to rely on spying on her new neighbour if she wanted to know who had moved in next door.

***

At the same time on the other side of the hallway, Jane sat hunched over her own laptop. Having been in London for nearly a week now she still had nothing to report to her head agent. Jane was tired, tired of waiting, tired of justifying her mission and tired of rereading the same information over and over again. She had no idea who lived next door as she had not met any of the seven other parties apparently residing in the building. She had memorised and written down the other names on the letterboxes next to hers. Three of the names had an added initial for the first name but the other four were simply last names, none of which had come up with any information when she had googled them and put them through all the databases she had access to. The brunette had not spent much time out of these four walls, too scared to miss her neighbour. She had only gone out to grab some groceries and she had barely slept. Having a peephole with an integrated camera that automatically sent a picture to her laptop whenever someone set off the motion sensor did not ease her mind at all. Especially since she had discovered that this new kind of technology was not as refined as the manual had made it out to be. The motion sensor only reacted if a person walked past her door at a certain angle. As the brunette lived on the third floor of a four story building, the only people she could exclude from the list of tenants possibly living opposite her were the two people upstairs. The other five people living in the building remained anonymous and could not be excluded as the suspect she was looking for. That was assuming they lived alone and had no partners or kids. Jane rubbed her temples, groaning as she was just about to finish her daily report for her superior. Trying to come up with anything that could justify her stakeout somehow when the soft ping of her laptop made her jump.

A small red one on the program connected to her camera peephole told her that a new picture had been taken. Giddily she clicked on it and waited for the picture to unfold. Jane could not believe her luck, the person depicted had keys in hand and was reaching towards the neighbouring door as if to unlock it. Only at second glance her hopes sank. The person in the picture was a woman. Enhancing the slightly grainy image, she made out long blonde hair cascading down a coat in soft curls. The woman was of slender build and shorter than the agent herself. Jane guessed she would be between 5´5 and 5´7. Cursing the bad lighting in the hallway and the absence of any outside light since the late afternoon had enveloped everything in a grey gloom.

Jane sighed. She wasn´t looking for a woman. Her suspect was a man. The profilers had been sure her suspect was a man and the two witnesses Interpol had interviewed had been sure the killer was a man. Attaching the picture to her daily report and detailing her thoughts in a few short sentences, she sent off the document to her superior before closing her laptop and walking into the kitchen. She needed a beer and something to eat. She could ponder on what her discovery meant later.

***

The blonde in the other apartment had come to the same conclusion. There was nothing to be done right now. She would just have to be on the lookout for anyone new she may see in the hallway or when she went down to check for mail in the next few weeks. Maybe she should just go over in a few days, knock and introduce herself. In the end it was simply her curiosity that needed to be satisfied. Maybe she would find a friend in the other neighbour...maybe even more. All she wanted was some company. Her work didn’t fulfil her. It was fun, but she wanted someone to have some fun with. A companion to cure her boredom. Maura originally wasn’t from London and had no friends or acquaintances in the city. First, she hadn´t cared and then she just hadn’t had time to make any meaningful connections. The other parties living in the building all had busy jobs and she never exchanged more than a few nice words with them. She opened a bottle of wine and poured herself a glass while she quickly set the dinner table and heated the pasta she had picked up from the ready meal section at Marks and Spencer’s on her way home.

***

Beer in hand, Jane made herself comfortable on the sofa, she had just gotten off the phone with the pizza delivery service and was hoping that they would have her pizza ready and delivered soon. The guy on the phone had assured her it would only take about 20 minutes to get her food to her. Jane was lazily switching through the tv channels, settling on a movie as the doorbell rang. Putting down her beer, she went to the intercom to check it was her pizza and let the delivery guy in.

***

Maura had just opened a folder, planning on familiarising herself with the newly assigned case as she heard voices. The blonde rushed to the door, spying through her own peephole to see a glimpse of black hair as the neighbouring door was shut and the pizza guy sauntered down the stairs. She still had no idea who was living on the other side of the hallway. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Updates to this story will be posted sporadically as my beta is super busy with finishing her degree right now and not always available to check new chapters right away.


	3. Another One

Agent Peralta was pissed. He and his partner VanGracht had been working on the Crucifix murders, as they dubbed them, for over a year now, but Interpol just happily let this American sweep in and take over. This was their case. They had put the work in. Countless of sleepless nights, sweat and tears. Disappointed their families because they couldn’t be at the important school play or match and for what?

Lotte VanGracht had been fast asleep when the phone rang. Her husband groaned on the other side of the bed as he turned around. Slipping out of the warm bed and into the cold of the night, she answered. "VanGracht?"  The tired voice of her partner came through the speaker of the phone, “We got a new body. Grab your suitcase, I´ll pick you up in half an hour." A sigh escaped Lotte´s lips as she grabbed some underwear and clothes from her wardrobe, "Where are we going this time, Gianni?" "Venice. I just got the call. The boss said they´d brief us on the plane,” he glanced at his watch, it was barely 6am. Who found a body at this ungodly time? "Alright, I´ll be ready." Lotte was already on her way into the bathroom when she hung up. 

Half an hour later, coffee in one hand and her small suitcase in the other, she left the house and got into her partner´s car. Lotte VanGracht always kept a packed suitcase in the hallway. Being an Interpol agent meant she was always on the go. London, Rome, Berlin, Paris. What had sounded so glamorous when she had entered the agency wasn´t in fact glamorous at all. All this traveling was tedious and exhausting. She spent more days in hotels than at home when they were working a complicated case and even though she loved her job she had grown a tad tired of it over the past couple of years. Yes, solving crime was her passion but was all this traveling really necessary? She wasn´t 27 years old anymore. She didn’t just live for her job anymore. She had a daughter she wanted to see grow up. She was tired of missing birthdays or having to leave on Christmas day because her boss deemed their job to be more important than anything else.

Gianni looked as tired as she felt. The pair had been working together for over 5 years now and Lotte knew exactly how he felt. They drove silently, not needing to talk. Sometimes she felt like she knew him better than her own husband but who could blame her. Working so closely with someone and spending 12 hours a day if not more together had caused the odd pair to form a close bond. Lotte knew that her partner always had her back and that she could trust him with her life. This was how a successful team worked. Having each other’s backs and being able to work nearly silently made them efficient. They were the best of the best and they had to pay the price for it.

The jet was already on the tarmac at Lyon Saint Exupery Airport when they arrived. 5 years ago, the sight of a private jet had still excited Lotte but these days it seemed like the most normal form of transportation to her. She didn’t miss the days of flying commercial, crammed into a tiny economy class seat as she tried to prepare for the case she was about to investigate. The private plane was essentially a mobile investigation room. They had everything they needed to fully prepare and get briefed on the new case as well as sneak in a nap if needed. Over the years the plane had lost its sparkle to her and she saw it as her second office.

Gianni and Lotte had barely sat down at the little table they used as their workspace while in the air when their boss video called them and gave them a brief run through of this morning’s incidents. The victim had been found in an alley just off Canale Grande in the San Marco district. A maid on her way to work had stumbled across the body and informed the carabinieri before entering a state of shock and being unable to be questioned any further. Interpol had been informed only half an hour later after the medical examiner had found the crucifix in the victim´s mouth. Every crime agency in Europe knew who to contact if they found a body like this and the crucifix killer had risen to notorious fame over the last year. 

The victim was Francesco Bianchi, a well-known politician and supporter of the arts. One of Venice´s high society. A do gooder and overall highly respected man. At only 40 years old, he had been one of the youngest members of the political party and with his handsome looks, he had been very popular with the ladies, despite having been married for over 10 years. His wife had been devastated by the news. She had not been suspicious of his absence, having assumed he slept in the office after working late. 

Reading through the scarce information she had scribbled down during her video briefing, Lotte´s brows furrowed. Everyone who had been questioned so far, which weren’t a lot of people given the early hour, had agreed that Seniore Bianchi had been a trustworthy, honest guy and an upstanding member of society. Looking at Gianni she remarked, "Either our killer made a mistake or Seniore Bianchi had some dark secret."Their new victim just didn’t seem to fit in with all the previous ones who had tried to appear as though they were good citizens on the outside but were actually members of criminal organisations. However, nothing in the background check she had quickly pulled up indicated that Seniore Bianchi was involved in anything dubious. Next to her Gianni nodded. He knew of the victim from the Italian paper he liked to read every morning to keep up to date on the news of his home country. From his recollection, Seniore Bianchi had never been suggested as anything but honest. 

Touching down at Venice Airport had been spectacular. Lotte had been practically glued to the window for their entire descent into the city. Like a child, she had watched the plane drift below the clouds to watch the magical city emerge below her. She had been here twice before with her husband and had fallen in love with the city. The narrow alleys, the canals and the architecture of every building had drawn her in. Somehow, Venice just seemed full of promise. Seeing the city so peaceful in the early morning light only added to its charm. No tourists were around yet and nothing seemed to disturb the lion statues basking in the sun.

The car picking them up at the airport took them straight to the morgue where they would meet up with the investigating commissario Rossi and his team of carabinieri. 


	4. I´m Watching You

Jane was up early the next morning. Sitting at the dinner table at 6am, her eyes barely open and a steaming cup of coffee in her hands. She was just blowing on the steaming liquid, craving that first sip of coffee when she heard a door slam. The hot liquid almost spilling onto her hands as she put the cup down and shot up from her seat. Jane rushed to her front door only managing to get a glimpse of blonde hair tied into a ponytail, a back clad in thermal outdoor gear before the other woman had disappeared down the stairs.

"Shit", Jane muttered under her breath. She was still in her pyjamas, an old CIA t-shirt, a pair of sweatpants and her thick woolly socks. There was no way she could catch up to the other woman. Still cursing, the brunette returned to the kitchen and sipped her coffee before she had a quick shower and got dressed. She couldn’t be too sure how much time she had before her neighbour came back.

An hour later Jane was ready to see the blonde return. She had been sat in front of her laptop the entire time, drinking cup after cup of coffee. Jane was not a morning person. She hated getting up early and she couldn’t understand anyone who did that if they didn’t have to. This time she was lucky, and her front door camera delivered a good picture of her neighbour. The woman in the picture was beautiful. Her side profile was angelic, and her hair was not just blonde but a golden colour. She was holding a bakery bag, her cheeks flushed from the run.

Jane had received the orders to follow the blonde late last night. Her senior agent and the profiler team had agreed that even though they were sure the woman was not their suspect Jane was to follow her every move since the agents believed she would lead them to the ominous man who rented the apartment. Their suspect. Her coat was on the back of her chair as she nervously paced around the room. She couldn’t afford to miss the blonde again. This time she actually had to follow her. Her superiors had been very clear in their email that she needed to provide them with something. Some new leads to justify her undercover assignment abroad. Something that justified her as a lead agent. It wasn’t much she needed but more than she had been able to provide in her first week on the task. Yes, it hadn’t been her fault that the person she was supposed to be surveilling wasn’t home, but she also hadn’t managed to actually find out the name of the occupant of the apartment. All they knew was that the man who had rented it according to the property agency was using a false identity. Running his name had brought up nothing and the estate agent that had shown the tenant the apartment couldn’t remember what he looked like either. The only information they could get out of the estate agent was a very generic description. Tall, short dark hair and a beard. There were millions of men out there that fit the description.

Jane muttered to herself, rehearsing her cover story over and over again to prepare for the worst-case scenario of being discovered by the other woman. She had done her fair share of undercover work when she was still working for the Boston PD drug crimes unit, but it had been a few years since then. When she had entered the CIA, her tasks had shifted, and she had suddenly found herself drowning in paperwork. It had taken a lot of hard work to move back into active duty and even more to convince her superiors of her agent qualities and leadership abilities. Jane hoped she hadn’t forgotten any of the undercover skills she had obtained, but just in case she bumped into the blonde from across the hallway, she made sure she knew her cover story by heart:

Jane Maldonado, 34 years old, unmarried. She was an English professor at NYU on a six-month sabbatical in London to immerse herself in the British culture and literature.

***

On the other side of the hallway the blonde woman was having breakfast. She had nothing planned for the day and was taking her time reading the paper as she indulged herself by eating a croissant. She deserved it after the 6k run she had just returned from. Pushing strands of hair still damp from the shower out of her face, she pondered on what she wanted to do today. A shopping trip sounded like fun. She hadn’t treated herself to new clothes in a while and shopping was a great way to distract herself from boredom. Maura took her time enjoying her coffee. Having a day off like that was a rare treat. She had been working nearly non-stop for the past few months.

At 9am she finally closed the paper, moved the stack into her recycling bin and got ready to head out. There were shops to hit, new outfits to acquire and some new restaurant to try for lunch.

***

Jane had been on edge for the past couple of hours, waiting for any signs of movement in the apartment opposite. Every few minutes she would head to the door and look through the peephole. This was not how she had imagined her first solo stakeout. Two hours of nothing. What was that woman doing? How long could someone take? Jane was starting to worry that the blonde would stay in all day and she had nothing to report to her superiors again. She was getting more nervous every minute that passed. Not even wanting to head to the bathroom in fear that it would be the moment the other woman would decide to head out. She couldn’t afford to mess up again and she was determined not to. At 9:30 she finally heard the door open, grabbed her coat and was ready to follow the blonde. She waited by her door with bated breath as the other woman leisurely strolled out of her apartment and onto the stairs before she followed the blonde.

Reaching the front door of the apartment building as it was about to close, Jane pushed outside, spotting a glimpse of blonde hair, she hurried after the other woman. Now outside, she didn’t put as much distance between them. The blonde had no way of knowing that she was being followed or who by, putting Jane at ease and prompting her to stay close. She couldn’t afford to lose the other woman. When the blonde boarded a cab at the nearest taxi stand, Jane panicked. But just as she walked past, looking for a cab herself she overheard her target´s destination. A puff of warm air left her lips as a sigh of relief washed over her. Reaching the top ofthe line at the stand and getting into her own cab mere seconds after the other woman had departed.

"Old Bond Street, please", Jane rasped as she quickly slid into the back of the car. There was no way she would have been able to follow the other cab, especially not in London traffic, but knowing where the blonde went made her life a lot easier. Jane only hoped that she would be able to spot the other woman quickly when they got there. She had no idea what was awaiting her, although she had a faint inkling that she had heard about Bond Street in relation to shopping or something.

"Oh boy", a whisper left the brunette´s lips when the car pulled up next to Dolce & Gabbana and the driver told her they had arrived. Luxury store after luxury store was lined up along the street. Jane knew today wouldn’t be fun for her.

***

It had taken Jane half an hour to find the blonde woman in a store called Valentino. Jane had nearly given up when she couldn’t spot the blonde hair cascading over a slender back. She was so close to throwing in the towel and calling it a day when she finally saw the other woman. Thanking her lucky stars when she could finally start what she had come for.

Jane only knew about a third of the brand names since she frankly didn’t care, and shopping was her biggest nightmare, but she had to follow the suspect. It was her job. Now trailing behind the blonde, entering some of the same stores while staying outside of others, Jane tried to not look suspicious. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, which was hard in her well-worn boots and the thick coat that had seen better days and even if it had been in pristine condition it was clear that it wasn’t the best quality, or the most expensive coat. Going through clothing racks, trying to look busy to not draw the attention of the shopping assistants to her, Jane kept glancing at the other woman. The blonde who so visibly knew what she was looking for, who looked like she belonged and who did not seem to be uncomfortable when talked to by shop assistants. In one store she was being served a coffee and in the next the blonde was holding a glass of champagne. Jane couldn’t help but notice the other woman´s beauty. The aura of aristocracy that surrounded her and how well she fit into these designer stores. Not looking like she was playing dress up but like she belonged.

Four hours later Jane had followed the suspect through Burberry, Alexander McQueen, Chanel, Louis Vuitton and many other stores she was too tired to remember so the ones she did had to be enough for her report. She had even followed the blonde, who was now carrying a substantial number of bags, to Selfridges. Jane was glad her suspect had opted to walk the short distance as this trip was already getting expensive for Jane and she hadn’t even bought anything. Now, watching the other woman browse the food hall and deciding on where to eat for lunch, Jane was hoping that this shopping trip would come to an end soon. She hadn´t seen any suspicious behaviour, she was cold, and she was hungry. None of the offered snacks or foods were affordable to the detective so she decided she would stick it out and eat back at the apartment, although she was disappointed she hadn’t thought to grab a cereal bar to take with her.

As if the blonde had heard her pursuers prayers, she only stepped into two further stores after she had finished her lunch and then called a cab. Alert, Jane had managed to call a cab only moments after and instructed the driver to follow the other woman. Telling him some bogus story that this was her best friend from university that she had just spotted and really wanted to catch up with since it had been years since they had last seen each other. When the cab entered Lambeth and the streets began to look familiar, Jane relaxed and told the driver she knew where her friend was heading. Jane got out right away and walked the remaining distance back to her apartment to save a little money.


	5. The Breakthrough

Maura had known she was being watched halfway through her shopping trip. At first it had been just a feeling, but when she saw the same mess of raven curls disappear behind a rack in the tenth store that she had also seen in store number 6 she was sure. Someone was following her but who and why?

It hadn’t taken her long to spot her pursuer. A tall woman in a shabby coat. Olive skin that peaked out from under raven curls. Curls that were framing a very beautiful clear-cut face. Italian, she’d guess if she had to. And while the woman’s clothes looked shabby to her, they were definitely not shabby as if she was homeless. More like she didn’t care much about her appearance. When Maura spotted her again in a store window, it suddenly became clear to her why the dark-haired beauty probably didn’t care much about how she looked. She was a cop. Maura saw it in the way the other woman walked. The way she casually stepped in and out of the shadows, trying to conceal what she was doing, but Maura knew. She could smell a cop from 10 feet away and she was proud of that. This ability had helped her in her quite turbulent youth, and it came in handy from time to

The only thing she needed to figure out now was why the cop followed her and were those raven curls maybe the same she had spotted disappear behind the neighbour’s door last night?

***

After three days of unsuspicious behaviour, consisting of a trip to the supermarket and another to the gym, had Jane wondering whether the woman next door had a job. If she didn’t need to work, she clearly had to have another source of income. Was she the hitman’s girlfriend? Maybe even wife? Or were they completely on the wrong track? She could simply be living off her trust fund or be the heir to a very large fortune, but if none of these were true, Jane simply wondered how the blonde could afford such a lavish lifestyle without working. The stores she had watched the women disappear into recently had all been expensive. The blonde didn’t even do her grocery shop at a normal supermarket. At least Jane didn’t consider buying groceries at Waitrose normal. The gym the blonde had disappeared into on day two wasn’t a simple gym. No, it was more than that. Jane had googled the so-called club as soon as she had come in that night, only to discover that it was an exclusive type of gym, including a spa, swimming pool and osteopathy treatments. It was definitely not like any gym she had ever set foot into. Especially not costing more than 300 pound a month...depending on the membership as Jane had learned during her online research.

Over the last three days Jane had been yelled at by her boss during the daily briefing. It wasn’t Jane’s fault that the suspect she was surveying wasn’t acting very suspicious. How was she getting the blame for this operation not being as clear cut as her superiors had imagined it to be? It wasn’t her fault that here daily report sounded pretty much the same every day.

***  
  
---  
  
Observational Protocol 

| 

Lead Detective: Jane Rizzoli  
  
Subject: Blonde woman, early to mid-thirties, height between 5´5 and 5´7, approximately 125lbs  
  
January 12th, 2010

6am

| 

Subject goes for a run  
  
---|---  
  
7am

| 

Subject returns home with a bakery bag  
  
9:30am

| 

Subject leaves home and heads towards New Bond Street  
  
10 am to 2pm

| 

Subject goes clothe shopping  
  
2:10pm

| 

Subject eats lunch at Selfridges  
  
2:30pm

| 

Subject continues her shopping trip  
  
3pm

| 

Subject heads back to the apartment  
  
No visitors for the rest of the day and the subject does not leave again. Everything stays quiet.

January 13th, 2010

9 am

| 

Subject leaves home and heads to Lanserhof at The Arts Club.

Unable to follow without a membership (not possible to acquire without being on a waitlist for several months)  
  
---|---  
  
12pm

| 

Subject leaves the club  
  
12:30pm

| 

Subject picks up lunch at The Square in Mayfair (modern French cuisine)  
  
1pm

| 

Subject returns home  
  
No visitors for the rest of the day and the subject does not leave again. Classical music can be heard through the wall.

January 14th, 2010

6am

| 

Subject goes for a run  
  
---|---  
  
7am

| 

Subject returns home with a bakery bag  
  
10am

| 

Subject leaves the house and heads to Waitrose  
  
10:30am

| 

Subject goes food shopping  
  
11:45pm

| 

Subject returns home  
  
12:30pm

| 

Subject heads out and meets with a middle-aged red-haired woman, about 5.9” tall  
  
1pm

| 

Lunch at Barrafina in Covent Garden (Spanish food, seems popular)  
  
3:15m

| 

Subject heads home  
  
No visitors for the rest of the day and the subject does not leave again. Occasional sounds come from the apartment, nothing noteworthy.

***

But then on day four, Jane noticed a shift. Something was different as she followed the blonde, now using the tube, to The Royal London Hospital. Now that wouldn’t seem odd if the blonde was any other normal individual heading to work, however she had solely used cabs for the past three days, which made her switch to public transport seem even more significant. What was different about today that she chose to use the tube? The brunette had been ready and prepared for her target to leave the house at 6am. Odd thing was, this time the blonde wasn’t wearing a running outfit at this early hour but something a lot more common. Jane studied the woman who stood about 6 feet to her right waiting for the tube. The coat the blonde was wearing was less fancy than the ones she had been sporting the past few days, but it still looked a lot more expensive than Jane’s. Other than that, she seemed normal. Wearing black slacks like any other office worker might.

As they were heading towards the entrance of the hospital Jane wondered, was the other woman a doctor? She clearly seemed to earn too much to be a nurse or a secretary. Maybe she was on the board of the hospital. Did they even have hospital boards in this country? Jane wasn’t sure. Her sole knowledge of how hospitals worked came from her few trips there when she had gotten injured and from endless nights of brainlessly watching Greys Anatomy while she was working or unable to sleep. She just needed background noise and there were always reruns of the show on some network. Just as the blonde was nearing the automatic doors at the entrance of the hospital, someone rushed out from within the building, almost colliding with the blonde as they did so. From a distance it looked like the women knew each other and Jane concluded that their suspect had to work at the hospital. Jane was too far away to see if the person who had just left the hospital was a man or a woman. Going by posture it could be either, the figure was wearing trainers and scrubs under their parka and their face and hair were hidden under a big hood. All Jane could see was that whoever it was seemed to know the blonde. Their gestures were friendly. Would she be talking to the person in scrubs that looked like they had clearly just ended their workday otherwise?

Jane knew she couldn’t follow the blonde around all day, so when the other woman disappeared into the building and headed straight towards the stairs leading to the neurology department, Jane decided she would wait for her in the little cafe in the entrance hall.

***

Unknown to Jane, Maura had known she was being followed and when she had spotted her pursuer on the tube she had to hide the smile that was playing on her lips. The detective was in for a very special treat today - a boring day at the cafe while she was off to do her work. Just what she was working on, the other woman should never discover.

She scanned the key card at the trainee doctors' changing rooms and slipped into the room quickly before she went towards a locker in the back and began undressing.

***

It had been a long and boring day for Jane. She had split her time between reading the book she had put into her backpack for this exact instance and typing up her observational protocol for the day so far. The detective had used the hospital’s visitor WIFI to check her emails and catch up on her bosses’ briefings while sipping on the coffee she had purchased after walking in. She needed to look normal. Like someone waiting for their family member to come out of surgery. Or a medical student who was using the cafe to do some work before heading into their shift. When she finally saw the blonde heading past the glass front of the Costa she was sitting in and towards the entrance door, a sigh of relief left her lips. Jane grabbed her things quickly and slipped on her coat as the blonde was already halfway out the door. The cold air hit her harder than she had expected after spending her day in the overheated hospital. It felt later than it was. Her watch indicated that it was just gone 4 but the January afternoon felt like an evening since the sun had already gone down. Jane was shivering in her coat as she hurried after the blonde and luckily for her the other woman went straight home.

No stops at fancy restaurants. No stopping by at the supermarket. The blonde moved as if she had somewhere to be. Another appointment maybe. Jane didn’t care. She was just happy when she could finally slip off her shoes and coat. Taking out her laptop and putting it on the dining table. Could she risk taking the shower she was dying for or would the other woman head out again? She really could not afford to mess up again. Jane´s laptop booted up quickly and she opened the programme that received all the pictures of her door camera. When music seeped through the thin walls 10 minutes later, Jane decided to risk it and took a quick hot shower. She was hungry, cold and tired and really hoped she could relax for the rest of the night.

***

And relax she could. At least up until half past nine everything stayed quiet. The brunette was thinking about heading to bed when the sudden ping of her laptop startled her, making her jump and rush to the machine that was still sat on the table.

There, on her screen, he was. Jane saw the clear outline of a man standing in front of the blonde´s door and dashed towards her own, pressing her eye to the peephole to get a better glimpse of the man who had just arrived next door. When the blonde woman opened the door, Jane could see sharp features and brown hair as the man quickly stepped into the other apartment. It wasn’t much but she was sure she had just seen their hitman. It had to be. This had to be the man they were looking for. All of a sudden she wasn’t tired anymore. Energy was flooding her body as if she had been hit by lightning and she quickly sent an email off to her boss to let them know that she had finally struck gold.

On the other side of her living room wall the music was turned up and Jane would not have been able to hear anything said behind the wall even if she had had the best spy technology available on the market.

***

“Ian, what have you got for me?”, the blonde, dressed in a silk robe, asked her visitor. Not extending him the courtesy of a hello or offering him a drink. For all she cared he could drop off what he had and leave. She had never liked him anyways but unfortunately they worked for the same company.


	6. Victim Number 21

While Jane had been busy following the blonde woman around, two detectives 945 miles away had been trying to make sense of the crucifix killer´s newest crime scene. Lotte VanGracht and Gianni Peralta had managed to keep the new body under wraps but by January 15th their boss had decided it was time to share the news of the newest victim with their American colleagues. Neither Gianni nor Lotte were happy about it, but their hands were tied. It didn’t help their case that they had made next to no progress in their investigations. Not in this case or any of the twenty prior ones scattered across Europe.

Ever since the body of Francesco Bianchi had been found they had been given the run around by their Italian colleagues. They were foreigners after all. Commissario Rossi and his team treated them nice enough but some of their Italian colleagues and all witnesses viewed them as foreigners that had to be ignored. Lotte and Gianni were often given false information by witnesses or left out of interrogations entirely. Not even Gianni´s Italian ancestry was helping them. His Italian was good, but his accent still gave him away. He and VanGracht were treated with suspicion.

Unsurprisingly, there were no valuable traces at the crime scene. Nothing. Not even a fibre. If they hadn’t found Francesco Bianchi´s body with his lips slightly parted and the crucifix peeking out, nothing would have pointed them towards the crucifix killer until the medical examiner´s arrival. The body had not shown any obvious wounds and Dr Mangiotta, the medical examiner, had only found a small bruise surrounding an even smaller needle mark. After careful assessment of the corpse´s state, arched back and a sardonic grin plastered to his face, Dr Mangiotta had uttered her suspicion that Bianchi may have been poisoned with strychnine. Both clinical presentations being typical for that kind of poisoning.

Dr Mangiotta briefed the team along with the two agents the day after she had completed the autopsy. "As I suspected, it was strychnine poisoning. As you can see here and here, Seniore Bianchi, is showing clear signs of strychnine poisoning symptoms." While she was speaking, the dark haired, beautiful ME was pointing at detailed pictures she was projecting onto the wall of the conference room. "He has a little injection mark here. You see, generally if strychnine is ingested, symptoms don’t show until about 30 minutes later and can last 12 to 24 hours, however I assume he has been injected with the poison as we found no traces of it in his stomach content. This would mean that his first symptoms, the grin and the spasms would have occurred no later than 5 minutes after the injection. I have determined his cause of death to be respiratory failure, which is amongst cardiac arrest and multiple organ failure one of the common causes of death for this kind of poisoning." VanGracht had been jotting down notes the entire time the ME was speaking and was now looking up. "Excuse me, Dr Mangiotta?", Lotte was offering the medical examiner a smile in the hopes that maybe this time her questions would not be ignored, "But doesn’t that mean that the street the body was found in was only part of the crime scene? Wouldn’t we need to at least try to find where he was poisoned?" If the crime scene actually consisted of several locations then maybe, just maybe, they would get lucky at the site of the initial attack and find something that could lead them closer to the killer.

Dr Mangiotta returned the smile as she was answering, "Yes that is correct. Considering his height, age and level of fitness he could have walked around 400 meters before the symptoms of the poison set in. So, it would be advisable to have the lab technicians search the streets in a radius of 500 meters around where he was found. Just to make sure we really don’t miss anything I think we should add these 100 meters." Brushing a strand of her hair behind her ear she continued, "But where was I..Oh yes. Strychnine is odourless and colourless, and it does not show in our usual tox screens. Commonly, you would test a person´s urine to see if they have been poisoned but that is impossible with a corpse, as you know, the bodily functions when someone dies.." At the sight of Commissario Rossi´s face scrunched up in disgust she stopped her detailed description of what actually happened to a human after his death. "I have sent off his blood and told the lab to check Seniore Bianchi´s blood gas levels. In addition to his very distinct pose and facial expression, the blood gas levels should confirm that the killer used strychnine."

Dr Mangiotta´s suspicion of which poison the victim had been injected with was confirmed three days after she had completed the autopsy and sent off blood samples to the toxicology lab.

While the lab technicians had been hard at work, so had the crime scene team. Screening the streets surrounding the crime scene in a 500-meter radius as had been suggested by the ME and the detectives. It had taken them two days to find anything that could be tied to the body but on day two a team of three crime scene technicians had found a few black fibres stuck to the brick of a building and the same gravel that had been under the shoes of their victim. The same black fibre had been found under the fingernails of Seniore Bianchi and it appeared that the fibre must have belonged to either a woollen jacket or coat. However, none of that actually helped them since analysis showed that whatever the fibre had come from wasn’t distinct. It wasn’t dyed with a distinct kind of dye you could only get in a few places; it wasn’t a mix of some fabrics that was special either. It was a coat like any other coat, while the structure of the fibre suggested it must have been a good quality piece of clothing, that was all they had and someone in a well-made black coat or jacket would have never raised any suspicion in the streets of Venice. While they had found their first crime scene, it did not tell them anything apart from the victim and the killer having been here. It told them that it appeared that the killer had been leaning against the brick, waiting for his victim, but with no cameras and no witnesses coming forward they weren’t any closer to catching their killer than before.

After a week in Italy, a week of dead ends and frustrating theories that led nowhere, Gianni and Lotte were on their way back home. Their boss didn’t think they could gain any more insight from being at the location of the 21st murder and that neither his agents nor the Italian detectives could benefit from each other any longer. If new leads would come up their Italian colleagues would inform them and then it would be decided if Interpol would send the two back, something that was unlikely since the only conclusion they could all agree on was that the killer had been long gone by the time they had arrived in Venice.

***

It was 2 in the morning, almost a week after the body of Seniore Bianchi had been found, when Jane´s laptop awoke with a ping and announced an incoming email. The brunette who had been dozing on the sofa for the past few hours drowsily wandered over to check who had sent her an email at this ungodly hour. She had just come to the conclusion that she really didn’t care and would just read the email in the morning. With one hand on the screen to close the laptop and send it to sleep so she could head to bed and get some well-deserved shuteye herself, she saw the subject of the email.

_"URGENT. CLASSIFIED."_

Suddenly Jane wasn’t so tired anymore, discarding the empty beer bottle she had been meaning to throw away on the kitchen table, she sat down and read the email that had just come in on her secure mailbox. "Shit, shit, shit.." Jane was muttering to herself as she read everything Interpol had gathered on the newest victim and sent to her boss. She couldn’t believe her own eyes when she saw the dates on the files and when they had finally come through. Obviously they couldn’t catch that guy. They couldn’t even work together as joint forces. Shaking her head once again as she confirmed having received the newest information on their killer.

The brunette opened the document she had been working on herself over the past few weeks and quickly wrote down the victim’s name, gender, age, height and so on as well as the modus operandi and location of the corpse. Maybe she could find a pattern this way. But all she noticed was that every single one of the victims showed a different modus operandi. Massaging her aching temples, she decided it was time to sleep. There was no way she could accomplish anything else tonight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long delay. I´ve had some very time consuming but also positive and potentially life changing things come up lately that have kept me pretty busy. 
> 
> I hope you guys enjoy the chapter!


	7. Mystery Man

That evening - exactly a week since his last visit - the mysterious man showed up on Jane’s screen again. He was back to visit the woman across the hall. Again. The brunette was perplexed when she saw the figure on the blurry picture. This was odd. Something clicked in her brain and she was rummaging through her notes. This was truly odd. Jane was muttering to herself as she was looking for what she thought she had noticed while skimming through her work earlier. “I know it’s here...I swear...something is wrong about this..”. Her finger found the exact line of writing she had been looking for, “ah here...I knew it!” The brunette’s hunch had been right. Not only was there exactly a week between the man’s first visit and this one, but the first time the mystery man had showed up at the other apartment had been the day after Seniore Bianchi had been found dead, and now exactly a week later. The day after she had been informed about the new case he was here again? This couldn’t be a coincidence anymore.

***

Maura took the folder Ian was handing her, not letting him into the living room but keeping him in the hallway of her apartment, as close to the door as possible. She didn’t like this guy. To be honest, she hated everything about him. His smirk whenever he looked at her, his way of dressing, and his -I’m better than you- haircut. The man exuded entitlement. Ian always had an air of money around him and he seemed to think he was a gift to the world and Maura despised him for it. She hated that she was forced to spend time with him. That he worked for the same company as her and that he was practically her immediate boss.

“Don't you want to ask me inside? Offer me a drink?” Ian cocked his eyebrow as he was taking in the beautiful sight of the woman in front of him. He made no secret out of fancying the blonde. The blonde who was blocking the way towards the living room was giving him an icy stare “No and no. You can go now. You’ve done your job, delivery boy.” The obnoxious man just wouldn’t leave her alone. He´d completed his task of delivering the new files and now was insisting on having a drink with her. Maura wasn’t having any of it. She snarled at the tall man trying to push past her and into the living room. "If you don’t leave now, you will regret it. Don’t think you can just act however you please just because you are working for management now. We both know why you got this job." Her mouth had turned into a snarky smile. "You just didn’t perform. That´s why you now get to do deliveries."

***

As soon as the man had disappeared in the blonde’s apartment, Jane put on her winter coat and boots and slipped out of her own front door. After all she had had orders to find their killer, the man who lived in the apartment according to the lease, and the tall stranger was the closest thing she had to a lead right now.

It was bitter cold outside, and she wished she had stayed inside but what if the blonde watched her leave right after her gentleman visitor? Jane didn’t want to draw any attention to herself or her job. But what if the man stayed the night? She couldn’t stay out in the cold. Loitering in a dark alley right in sight of the front door of her building, the brunette questioned her life choices. Blowing into her hands every couple of minutes as she was trying to warm her freezing fingers, Jane kept checking her watch. He must have come out by now if he wasn’t staying the night. Jane decided to give the man another 5 minutes tops before she would give up and return to her warm apartment. Surely her bosses wouldn’t want her to freeze in the cold.

Since the man´s last visit, Jane had received orders to follow the suspect if humanly possible. Humanly possible meant that she had to follow him if he left on foot or on the tube, but if the visitor had a car it would be impossible for Jane to follow him. Cabs were out of the question at this time of night since everyone was out for drinks or dinner or going to a party. Shimmying from one foot to the other in an effort to keep herself warm, Jane was ready to give up when finally, the front door opened, and the man exited the building. Pulling up his collar as he was rushing towards the tube.

Jane had an easy time following the suspect to Lambeth North and board the Bakerloo line one door down from where he had embarked on the tube. 5 stops later the man left the tube and headed onto Oxford Street, Jane right on his heels, but only a few minutes later he had disappeared into the bustling streets. Jane was cursing under her breath. She had underestimated how many people could be out on the street at this hour. She was spinning in a circle, frantically searching the masses as she started walking around but she couldn’t find the man again. How had she lost him? How would she be able to explain this to her boss? Half an hour of fruitless wandering later Jane entered Oxford Circus again and headed home. She was freezing, hungry and tired.

***

Maura sighed. She felt dirty as always. Ian´s company, even if it was just for a few minutes, always made her feel that way. She needed to request somebody different deliver her files next time. The blonde made a mental note to complain as she walked into the bathroom. Her work files in one hand as the other grabbed a bottle of wine and a glass. The blonde put her glass and the files down on a little table she had purchased for the sole purpose of having a glass of wine in the bath or reading while she was soaking in the nice hot water. Sighing as her body sank into the vanilla scented water, Maura closed her eyes and inhaled the scent of her bubble bath. Allowing her muscles to relax for a few minutes before she sat up, dried her hands and started to rummage through the work files.

***

The next day Jane was studying her tables again. There were no similarities. No patterns. None. Unless you counted that everyone on that list had been wealthy, powerful and in a high position. But if you did a victim profile just based on that, how many people could be potential victims. Too many Jane decided. The victims didn’t seem to know each other but she had to do more research to be completely sure. Maybe they were all attendees at a conference? Maybe they had been involved in business deals with each other? This was not a serial killer case. This was not as easy as finding a modus operandi or a preferred victim typology like she could if she worked on a serial killer case. To be honest she would have preferred that at this point. At least she could use everything she had learned in the countless behavioural analysis workshops and trainings she had taken at Quantico. This was harder. A hitman had no motive. A hitman killed for money and not pleasure. All there was left to do was follow the money. Contacting headquarters to find out if their technicians could screen the banks for any big transactions around the dates a boy had been discovered and if that could be done for transactions in the past, or if in fact Interpol had already done that.

Sipping her coffee cuddled up on the couch she used the horrid morning to relax a little while also getting some work in. She had not managed to do much else the night before as she had been knackered by the time she had finally managed to get back to her apartment and take a scalding hot shower. Jane had already informed her boss about her failure to trail the man any further than Oxford Street and she was dreading the lecture she was sure was coming her way.

***

Maura was feeling as if she was under constant surveillance. She knew she had been trailed a few times while she had been out but over the past few weeks the feeling had increased even more. Why was that dark haired cop following her? Was the woman living opposite her also the woman who was following her? She really had to figure it out if her inkling of the woman she had witnessed trailing her and the woman who had conveniently just moved into her building were one and the same. It wasn’t so much that Maura was concerned about being followed, but it did annoy her. She wanted to know why someone was following her every move - whenever she let them. Every time she was out on important business she made sure to rid herself of her follower or occupy the other woman by making her believe she was somewhere she wasn’t. Lately, she had seen the brunette a few times by the mailboxes, but she had decided it wasn’t the right time to introduce herself just yet. If she was being honest, she quite enjoyed the challenge of having to dodge the dark-haired woman. She enjoyed outsmarting her and the last few months in London had been entirely too boring to confront the other woman just yet. She would find out why she was being followed when the time was right.

***

By the beginning of week two, Jane had finally deducted that the mailbox M Isles had to belong to the mysterious blonde. She had bumped into the other woman several times by chance. Sometimes Jane was just coming in from her weekly shop as the blonde was leaving. Her instructions to trail the blonde every step she took having been eased ever since her bosses decided that the mysterious man who had visited the blonde twice was of higher importance than she was. Jane still made an effort to follow the other woman around most days, but she was worried the blonde would notice her so she had also started to act like any normal person would. Going for walks, leaving the house just to run some errands and actually exploring London a little bit. Jane had seen the blonde come from the mailbox with the inscription M Isles twice when she had gone to check her own mailbox. Returning to her apartment with nothing but flyers and the occasional occupancy letters and finally the knowledge of at least the woman´s last name.

Eventually, by the end of week two, she had gotten lucky and ran into the blonde as she was coming up the stairs, letters tucked under her arm with her name clearly visible. The woman who had just come from a run was "Maura Isles".

Once Jane had returned from her very quick trip to the shops, an errand she had decided not to abandon as she was nearly out of everything, she had run the name "Maura Isles" through every database available to her and the only hit she had was for a Maura Dorthea Isles, born August 7th, 1976, in Boston. The only problem was that said girl had been kidnapped in 1986. Jane had found countless newspaper articles in which a rich couple begged for their daughter to be returned to them with an offering of millions of dollars to the kidnappers. Digging deeper into the newspaper archives revealed that the media attention had slowly trickled out over the following weeks and months. Jane had already been ready to give up, her eyes stinging and her back aching from the hours she had spent skimming through blurry scans of newspaper articles, when she found the mention of an obituary for the little girl. However, there was no mention of what had happened to her. Rummaging through the rest of the newspaper issues for that year had not revealed any more information, which was curious and left Jane with only one other option, she had to call the Boston PD and request the case file.

A few hours later she was finally on the phone to the Boston PD, having had to wait until it was a reasonable time to call considering there was a 5-hour time difference between the cities. It took Jane about half an hour to get her request through. After proving her identity, she was finally patched through to the file archive. She was assured that the officer in charge of the archive would locate the casefile right away and that he would fax it to her.

Pacing her apartment, she wondered how long it could take for them to find the file. Worrying that it somehow had disappeared. Afterall, it had been twenty-four years since the kidnapping. The brunette wondered if the officer who had worked the case was still around and if she would be able to contact him once she knew more. Growing up in Boston herself, she had no recollection of the kidnapping even though the case seemed to have rattled the public for months. She had only been eleven years old at the time and her mother had always been overly protective of her, making it impossible for her to remember if the case had even rattled her neighbourhood. It was unlikely though seeing as the kidnapped little girl had grown up in Beacon Hill, one of the rich neighbourhoods in Boston, while Jane and her brothers lived in East Boston. After everything she had found out in the past few hours, Jane was convinced that Maura, the woman living in the apartment next door could not be the same Maura that had been kidnapped. It was simply impossible, there had been a funeral and everything. Maybe her hunch about the other woman having something to do with the killings was wrong, after all, every time she had followed the blonde, she had not witnessed any suspicious behaviour. Jane felt like she was just being paranoid. Maura Isles, the woman next door, was a common citizen. One who had never been in trouble with the law.


	8. A New World

And then suddenly everything changed. Three weeks after Jane had arrived in London life as she knew it was over. On January 25th she had gone to bed with little to no worries. She pondered the new information about her neighbour, wondering how she could justify her overseas stay much longer. She wanted to crack this case. To finally show what she was made of. But when she woke up on January 26th, the world was different. A disease had quietly crept up on them. Well not so quietly if the government had taken the reports from Africa and South America seriously. Not so quietly if the news outlets hadn´t been advised to keep everything they heard under wraps.

When Jane woke up on January 26th, still tired and feeling like getting up at 6:45am was a bad idea, she had no idea that her morning would go completely different than she had planned. Jane had decided that this Tuesday would be a good day to follow her neighbour if the blonde decided to go anywhere. She hadn´t trailed the blonde in four days and thought she should at least try to in the hopes that she may finally get lucky and find another piece of the puzzle. Something she could sell to her bosses. Some new evidence, new information, anything at this point. Jane was seriously grasping at straws.

Originally Jane had not wanted to share her new intel with her bosses, but she had begrudgingly realised that her bosses would know about the files she had requested from the Boston PD and she had to let them know about the lead that had turned out to be nothing. She had tentatively changed the words "blonde woman" and "suspect" to Maura. Until she had proof that the woman next door was in fact not who she claimed to be she might as well refer to her by the name the blonde had chosen. Jane was still waiting to hear back from headquarters who had put their best computer specialists onto the case to do background checks on any Maura Isles that had been registered anywhere in the world. But if the woman was using a false name, there was no way she could get any more background information. Jane was convinced that her neighbour wasn’t using a false identity. After all, everything she had found out about the other woman seemed perfectly normal. Everything but the shady looking man that had visited her twice already. In the unlikely case that her neighbour was using a false name, Jane had decided she had to somehow get to know her. Bump into the blonde in the hallway maybe. She really could not go up and introduce herself as the new neighbour anymore. She had missed that opportunity by about two and a half weeks. Unfortunately, her bosses had briefed her to stay hidden and not make contact with the other woman, otherwise she would have already weaselled her way into the blonde’s life. If Jane was honest she would have preferred that. Following the woman for as long as she had, her life seemed like it would be fun - well minus the excessive shopping trips. Jane also had to secretly admit to herself that she was developing a little crush on the blonde. But how could she not? Anybody with eyes would see how beautiful the woman was. From following Maura, Jane had drawn the conclusion that the blonde was much more than just a beautiful woman. She had observed her when she had gone into bookstores and picked up books with titles that made Jane feel like she was an idiot. A few days back, Jane had picked up a few of the books she had seen the blonde buy and she had to be honest she didn’t even understand the summary on the back cover. Maura was buying books about neurosurgery, forensic pathology and other medical books. The only book that she seemed to have bought for some light reading - well not really light reading where Jane was concerned - was "The Skeleton Cupboard: The Making of a Clinical Psychologist" by Tanya Byron. If Jane was being honest the beautiful blonde had occupied her thoughts a bit too much the last few days and she was looking forward to following the other woman through the cold January day, but then everything turned out different than planned. Not just for her but for the entire UK population.

Sleepily walking into her kitchen, Jane started the coffee machine, turned on her laptop and the tv. She had made it a habit to not just check her emails in the morning but also to watch the news. You never knew if their killer had decided to kill again. Coffee in hand, she settled in front of her TV as the 7am news came on. What Jane saw on the screen nearly made her spit out her coffee. A banner that read "Stay at home. Save lives." was displayed at the bottom of the screen while the Prime Minister read a statement telling everyone they had to stay at home and were under strict lockdown rules. A bronchitis like disease had rapidly spread among cities and villages across Europe and North America. Costing 1000s of people their lives without anyone knowing what was going on. The Centre for Disease Control had said the disease had stemmed from Southern America and Africa and originally needed a warm climate to spread, however for some reason it had crept up on them in the middle of the winter. Transformed into a different sort of virus that now withstood the cold and even seemed to thrive in it. Calling for a worldwide lockdown after seeing the devastation the flu like disease had already caused in South America, the CDC had succeeded with at least convincing the entirety of European countries to follow their calls and put everyone under house arrest. Listening to the Prime Minister, an eery feeling spread inside of Jane. She had never seen anything like this. Never had a disease impact her life, the lives of millions of people, like this. Only key workers were permitted to leave the house and you had to prove your status as a key worker. Leaving for essential food shopping was only permitted after you applied for it and every citizen who was out on the streets had to carry either a permit or staff ID that proved their status as a key worker.

At first, Jane had thought that the pandemic would be a sudden end to her undercover mission but then all commercial flights had been grounded. Indefinitely. Now Jane was stuck in a country that was not her own, in an apartment that wasn’t her own. Far away from her family. To make matters worse, the nature of her mission required absolute discretion, which meant she couldn’t even talk to her family. Jane did the only thing she could to let her mother know she was well and safe. She relayed a message through her bosses, hoping they would deliver it to her family in a timely manner. Signing off her email a few minutes later, Jane got up and slowly looked around her apartment. What should she do now? At 7:30 in the morning. It would be at least five more hours until anyone would be at headquarters to get her message. Five hours before she could even expect any briefings. Not that her bosses could do anything for her. Jane decided to take a hot shower before she would make a list of everything she should buy in her next food shop - a food shop she had to register for. She knew she had enough food for the next couple of days, but she was also sceptical about how this new system of registering to go out to shop would work. What if everyone tried to shop and she would have to wait two weeks for a slot? Yes, the government had advised to have food delivered from the supermarket, but Jane was unsure how that worked and figured it would be easier for now to go herself. She had no British bank account and her credit card was not accepted everywhere. A fact that had come as a surprise to Jane since she had always assumed that credit cards you had to sign for were normal. But in the UK she was an oddity. Everyone had cards with chips in them and PINs so Jane was heavily relying on the cash allowance she had received from her bosses. Jane decided to register for her first food shop before she headed into the shower. Signing up to the newly established "grocery scheme", she ticked the "as soon as possible" box when asked when she would like to go food shopping and left her email to receive her pass with the exact date and time frame she was allowed to go shopping in took her no more than 10 minutes.

Now all she could do was wait and the brunette decided that there was no better place to wait than a hot shower.


	9. Like A Ghost

With the world in stand still, the killings just had to stop. Lotte and Gianni were sure of it. After all, how could a killer roam the streets when everyone was on house arrest? First it seemed as if they had been right. No new killings occurred, no new corpses were found, and the crime statistics rapidly declined - at least for a week.

And then they were all proved wrong. A heavily mutilated body turned up on the embankment, crucifix in mouth and in the middle of a strict lockdown. A lockdown that had been imposed in a manner that should have made it impossible for a killer to dispose of a body. Only key workers could freely roam the streets, well not so freely but at least they did not need any special permits to be out. Only their staff pass. But now a new victim had been found, in London to make matters worse. The city they had been suspecting to be their killer’s hidey-hole. The city the CIA had placed an undercover agent in to keep an eye on the suspected killer´s headquarters. An agent that had produced next to no new leads apart from her suspecting a man she had seen visit the apartment twice. A man she had then lost when she was supposed to be following him. Obviously the CIA had been wrong, the apartment they were surveying was not where the killer lived and the woman who occupied it seemed harmless as well. Gianni, Lotte and their team had been ignoring the CIA´s mission as they just didn’t deem it plausible. They didn’t have enough manpower to start their own undercover surveillance either and figured that at least this way they could work with whatever the Americans came up with and if that was zap they at least hadn’t wasted any money on it. But now they had a body in London and considering the fact that their killer couldn’t travel for the time being, it seemed more and more likely that the CIA had been right. Maybe their killer was indeed camped out in London and had been for this entire time. Gianni was still sceptical. In his mind it made no sense to kill that close to "home".

***

In Amsterdam, Lotte and Gianni had been hard at work. While most of the city was deserted and people were stuck at home, everyone at Interpol had continued to work as usual. They had been tying up loose ends, finishing up reports about victim number 21 while also going through what the CIA was willing to share of their observations. Not that the agent stationed in London had produced much. Lotte was unsure how suited the young agent was for the task they had burdened her with, however even she had to admit that the woman´s newest idea of following the money was brilliant. Interpol had put their best forensic scientists and computer whizzes onto the case. They had been collaborating with banks all across the globe to track any large sum of money that had been transferred around the murder cases. So far they had not come up with anything, but it was only a matter of time until they had a hit. An unexplainable big transaction. They only needed one to get a new potential lead but with most banks not operating completely digitally just yet, this would take a while.

***

"When in London", Lotte jokingly said as the plane touched down at Heathrow Airport. This had been the first time they had landed on time when arriving at Heathrow. Usually the plane had to circle for at least half an hour before they were given the ok from the tower and approached the runway, but with no one traveling and all planes grounded their descent into the foggy city had been a breeze. The emptiness of the usually bustling airport was eery - only the bare minimum of staff being present and the few workers who were unlucky enough to have to go to work in a situation like this stayed far away from them. Unlike in the Netherlands, masks were not mandatory yet in the UK but both Gianni and Lotte had opted to wear N95 masks for their protection as well as others. Both of them were worried about their families at home especially since they had to still go to work while Lotte´s husband, a researcher in forensic psychology, got to stay home with their 6-year-old daughter. Her partner, Gianni, was worried about his parents. They had always been especially close, but ever since his dad had retired early because of a heart condition, Gianni made sure to visit them at least twice a week. Now that his dad was in the high-risk category, while Gianni himself had to continue working and being exposed to people, he had decided to only see his parents from a distance. Talking to them from the curb side nearly daily now while also having taken over the food shop for them had made his life a lot more stressful. The worry they felt was eating away at them and some days both of them struggled to focus on the job at hand. Catching a killer.

***

Just like their descent into Heathrow Airport had gone smoothly and without any wait times, their drive into London went by a lot quicker than usual. Without the traffic, they had reached the crime scene in no time and were met by an officer of the Metropolitan Police who showed them where the body had been discovered a few hours earlier. There were still crime scene workers at the scene, processing any trace that could be related to their killer, a task made more tedious by the location of the scene. They had to collect everything, cigarette butts and trash included, just because you could never be sure who had left the item behind. Once Lotte and Gianni had finished their inspection of the body dump location, they had been taken to the MET headquarters and shown pictures of the scene with the body still in place. Like with the previous case, the dump location was clearly not the primary crime scene. The level of mutilation the body had gone through without a single drop of blood was simply impossible.

***

Several hours, briefings and a visit to the morgue later, Lotte had finally entered one of the bedrooms of the apartment the Detective Chief Inspector had kindly prepared for them. Usually the apartment was used as a safe house for witnesses but with hotels being closed Interpol and the MET had liaised and made the apartment available to the two agents. Sighing, Lotte plopped down into the little armchair placed in the corner of the room. She got her phone out of her purse and called home. She would just make it in time for her daughters’ bedtime. She knew her daughter would be disappointed to only hear her voice and not be able to see her but getting out her laptop and setting it up would take too long and she really didn’t want to mess with the 6-year-olds bedtime. Especially not now that her husband was already annoyed with her having to jet around the world as he liked to call it. Lotte would set up her laptop and connect it to the apartment’s WIFI later so she could make it up to her daughter by reading her a bedtime story the next night. At least she hoped she could.

***

In the meantime, Gianni had been on the phone to his parents who reassured him they were doing just fine and not to worry. He had also ordered pizza and taken a quick shower. Lotte joined him 45 minutes later after her teary-eyed little girl had finally settled down and she had hopped in the shower herself. With everyone ordering food in these days their pizza was taking a little longer than usual anyways and she had been desperate to wash the day off of her. The two were settling down with their plates of steaming hot food not long after, discussing their agenda for the next day and swapping ideas of how the killer may have been able to leave the body at the scene.


	10. Beautiful Stranger

It had been three days since Jane had applied for her permit to go grocery shopping. Three days since she had received her slot to replenish her quickly receding stock. The brunette had been a bit unlucky with the allocation of her shopping slot and had received a slot six days later. She still had two more days to go and while she wasn’t in a situation where she had to cut down on food, her favourite snacks had quickly disappeared, and the brunette was ready to get more. It would have been easier at home, where she could just get groceries delivered but being abroad made it a lot harder for her.

Jane had spent the entire morning planning meals she could make in large batches and then freeze and had written grocery lists so she could stock up for at least the next three weeks. She had also spent a lot of time online researching the best ways to store fruit and vegetables and decided that it would be best for her to buy bread flour and yeast. For the first time in her life Jane would attempt to bake bread. Actually, this would be the first time she attempted to bake anything in her life. As a child she had never shown much interest in baking or cooking and much to her mother´s dismay she had spent her days outside and not learnt any of the family recipes as was expected of a good Italian girl.

The brunette was napping on the couch, exhausted from the late nights she had spent trying to crack her case, exhausted from planning her shop and just exhausted from the general situation. She had read somewhere that being tired and exhausted in a traumatic situation like the one everyone was living in was just a natural response to trauma. When faced with trauma, the brain still had the instinct to shut the body down, play dead and wait for the situation to pass. The knock on the door startled her awake and it took Jane a full minute to realise what had woken her. Who would knock on her door? In a pandemic? When everyone was on house arrest.

Jane hurried to the door and peeked through the peep hole. The brunette couldn’t believe her eyes at what she saw. There in front of her door stood the blonde woman from across the hall, smiling with a basket of food in her arms. When Jane opened the door, she noticed that the blonde wasn’t stood directly in front of her door, she was keeping to the mandatory two feet distance and Jane appreciated it even though she knew for a fact that the blonde had not left the house since the lockdown had been announced. The only times she had seen Maura leave her apartment; the other woman had returned less than five minutes later. Some days she carried a bag of takeout that looked too fancy to be takeout, on others she had letters in hand and once she had carried a big crate that seemed to contain groceries.

"Hi, I´m Maura", Jane heard the blonde say and she had to hold back an 'I know' that would have clearly put the other woman off. Instead, Jane heard herself reply, "Hi, nice to meet you. I´m Jane..". The blonde didn’t seem to notice how frazzled Jane was and simply nodded. Smiling she pointed her chin towards the basket in her hands, "I haven´t seen you in the hallway in the last week and thought you could maybe use some supplies." Seeing Jane´s face scrunch up in worry she quickly added, "I have a set delivery slot, always had because of my work schedule, so don´t worry. Promise." With a smile she handed the basket to Jane, keeping the distance as best as she could. "Thank you. That is too kind of you Maura. You really didn’t have to..", Jane muttered as she took the basket. Without even examining the basket she could tell that the bread, deli meats and little treats it contained must have been very expensive. "I..I don’t really know what to say..", she quickly added and gratefully smiled at the blonde woman. Her dinner had been saved. No frozen pizza for her tonight. Maura quickly brushed off Jane´s mumbling, "Don´t worry. Really. You´re not from here..American, right? I mean if I interpreted that accent correctly." Blushing Jane nodded as Maura continued, "It can be hard to be abroad, especially now, so please just let me know if you need anything." And with that the blonde turned around and returned to her apartment.

When Jane unpacked the basket on her kitchen table a small piece of paper fell out between the packaged cheeses and deli meats. A small frown formed on her forehead as she unfolded it. In neat handwriting it said:

" _Please don´t hesitate to contact me. Not just if you need anything._

_maura.isles@gmail.com_

_PS: I don´t bite, I promise.."_

With a smile on her lips, Jane placed the note next to her laptop. Maybe she should email the other woman. Maura seemed nice, after all she had brought food to a complete stranger and if Jane was honest the last few days she had been cooped up in the apartment had gone by painstakingly slow. There was nothing on tv and the movies she had ordered in a moment of complete boredom would take at least another few days to be delivered. Mail had slowed down and so had deliveries. At a time when everyone was suddenly forced to order online the warehouses were backed up and so was the post. To make matters worse, there were only reruns on tv, no matter which channel she switched to the show or movie that was on was old or worse: a rerun of a rerun.

***

Oh, how she was hoping the brunette who had introduced herself as Jane would email her. Now that she officially knew the other woman´s name she wanted to get to know her better. Maura had been bored out of her mind, with work having slowed down and no new assignments coming in, her days were slow. She could really use someone to talk to. Not one of the brainless strangers she was chatting with on MySpace or getting paired with on Omegle. Some days the blonde had a blast chatting shit with the random stranger Omegle paired her with but on others she just wanted to have a nice conversation with someone who had more than two braincells. She preferred anonymous social media sites; not caring much to have anyone on the internet get any kind of personal information on her. She had learned the hard way and vowed to herself years ago to not trust strangers with personal information. It was hard in her line of work to make friends. Long hours and not being able to disclose her day to day dealings to anyone didn’t make it easier. While it was already near impossible to have friendships, dating was out of the question for her. Usually Maura was fine with that, valuing her time too much to waste it on some guy and not caring much about the drama relationships with other women had thrown her into during her late teens and college years. But ever since the lockdown started, she was secretly craving some good company; quality time spend with somebody she could talk to. Maybe someone who shared her passion for books. And while she didn’t know the brunette living across the hall at all, Jane seemed interesting. Something about the dark-haired beauty intrigued Maura and she just had to get to know the other woman. With her mind still occupied with the beautiful new acquaintance she had hopefully made, Maura got herself a glass of wine and the newest issue of Vogue for some light reading.

***

Jane was pacing the living room. Note in one hand while the other was rubbing the bridge of her nose. Should she email Maura? Jane wasn’t sure her bosses would be too happy if she initiated contact with their target, but the blonde woman had been kind and brought her food. Not just that, she had also extended the invitation. Plus, weren’t they all sure by now that Jane was just wasting her time and that Maura Isles was not the killer they were looking for. Hadn’t her boss just yelled at her the other day calling Maura an ordinary woman? Where Jane was concerned, the blonde was anything but ordinary, although her bosses view on their former suspect would make it ok for her to talk to the blonde. She just had to - and if it was just to say thank you for the food. Sending a thank you email was the least she could do. It would be more than ungrateful to just accept the gift and not do anything. Jane made up her mind and sat down. Thankfully a fake email address for personal usage had been part of her undercover identity. Opening her email programme and pressing the "compose new message button" before she could reconsider:

**From: jane.maldonado@gmail.com**

**Subject: Thanks**

"Hi _Maura,_

_Thanks for food."_

Jane slapped her hand to her forehead, sighing deeply as she deleted the words letter by letter. This was just wrong. She couldn’t say thanks. What would the blonde think of that. Thanks, was too informal for someone like Maura. For heaven’s sake the woman had a customer account at Prada. With a groan Jane´s fingers lowered onto the keyboard again. God why did she have to be so socially awkward?

**From: jane.maldonado@gmail.com**

**Subject: Thanks**

_"Thank you so much for the food basket you brought over earlier. I´m sorry if I gave you the impression of not wanting to talk to you. I promise that was not the case, I was just so stunned by your kindness. So, thank you again._

_Jane"_

Yes, this was better. No "hi", no "thanks" and no awkward "best wishes". Her message was personal but short. She didn´t ramble and she hoped she didn’t sound awkward either. Before Jane could reconsider she pressed the send button, quit her email programme and closed the laptop. She was too anxious for a potential reply to stay on her emails. Anxious for no reason if she was honest. All she had done was send a thank you email to her neighbour. Jane unwrapped the loaf of ciabatta Maura had left her, cut off two slices and made herself a sandwich before she returned to the tv, where she hoped she would find at least something halfway decent to watch to occupy her time until it was time to go to sleep.

***

Halfway through an article about the upcoming fashion week in February, that had obviously now been cancelled, she heard the faint "ping" her laptop made whenever she received an email. A smile spread on her lips as she headed to the desk she had placed her MacBook Pro on earlier. Maura was hoping the incoming email was from the other woman. She hadn’t launched her secure email programme, she never did after hours and where she was concerned, her official hours had ended at 4pm, so it couldn’t be work related and she never gave out her email. This just had to be the brunette. Letting her fingers dance across the touchpad of the laptop to wake it, she subconsciously held her breath until she saw the sender of the message:

"jane.maldonado@gmail.com"


	11. Dystopia

Going out to get groceries had been absurd. Jane had never felt so out of place. The streets were nearly empty, only a few people were out, and every time Jane encountered someone else either she or the stranger crossed the street. It was as if everybody she saw was contagious and everybody who saw her thought the same about her.

Some countries in Europe had made masks mandatory as it was believed that the disease spread quickest through airborne droplets, droplets every human being breathed out every minute of the day, but neither the UK nor the US had implemented that measure. The UK government didn’t seem to think it was necessary to have any other protective measures than "stay at home", "stay 6 feet away from anyone" and "wash your hands". Jane thought it was hilarious how suddenly everyone frantically washed their hands as if that was the newest invention. As if regularly washing hands shouldn’t be a common thing for people anyways. She was worried that if she didn’t laugh about it, it would actually scare her to see how many people apparently didn’t wash their hands on any given day when they came in from outside or left the bathroom. And here she was having thought everyone had been taught how important handwashing was. At least people weren´t protesting the measures over here like they did in her home country. Jane would never understand why her fellow Americans acted as if they had been put into prison just because they weren’t allowed to move as freely as they were used to.

Jane pulled her scarf over her mouth and nose as she entered the supermarket and quickly followed the instructions to disinfect the cart and her hands. Jane knew that scarfs weren’t really that effective and while it wasn’t mandatory to wear anything to cover your mouth or nose, she just felt like she should at least try to do it. The brunette had ordered masks a few days into the lockdown, but they hadn’t arrived yet. The postal service was backed up and couldn’t deal with all the extra parcels, which meant she wasn’t sure when her masks would even come. Following the one way system the store had implemented was strange. It felt off to not be able to freely go back and forth between aisles and Jane made sure she took her time and checked her shopping list thoroughly before she moved into the next aisle. She definitely did not want to forget anything while she was out since she wasn’t sure how soon she would be able to get another grocery slot again. Being in a different country, a country in which supermarkets had a different system of what they kept where didn’t help either. She loaded up her cart with the last few bags of rice, pasta and flour she could find as well as fresh fruit, vegetable, fish and meat. Unsurprisingly, pretty much all non-perishables had disappeared from the shelves and the brunette was forced to buy fresh milk instead of long-lasting one. The stores had been brought close to empty in the first few days after the lockdown and even though people were only allowed to shop at their allocated time and there was new food coming in, store clerks just didn’t seem to be able to restock the shelves quick enough. Luckily, Jane had already been anticipating something similar and had adjusted her shopping list accordingly. She would just have to freeze her fresh supplies and figure out what she could do about the milk situation. The freezer aisles were completely wiped, and Jane counted her lucky stars that she still had some meat and chicken in the house that she had frozen when she hadn’t needed it and was only topping up her supplies to last her a few weeks. She was also able to find some yeast so at least she could make her own pizza. Not that she wouldn’t have preferred to pick up some frozen ones since fresh pizza was just a lot more time consuming to make but at least making pizza would occupy her time.

With two fully loaded bags in each hand, Jane exited the supermarket and started on her way home, which now seemed much longer than the 10 minutes it had taken her to get to the supermarket. By the time Jane had finally reached the front door of her apartment complex, her arms were numb, and her hands were throbbing. The plastic handles of the bags had dug deeply into her palms and left darkish red imprints. Muttering a few swearwords under her breath, Jane took the last set of stairs and sighed in relief as she put down the bags in front of her apartment door. She was just pushing the bags in with her foot, massaging her now prickling hands as she heard the faint ding of her laptop that announced a new email.

***

Maura was bored. She had been bored out of her mind for days now. It wasn’t like she had nothing to do. Her study was filled with books, some she had read and some she hadn’t had the time to read yet. Her tv stand was stacked with the latest technology and a variety of DVDs she had never seen because to Maura, watching a movie had always seemed like a waste of her time. Her laptop kept dinging in frequent intervals as more and more emails came in, but Maura was still bored. She missed her work. She missed being on the move, traveling, and working difficult cases. She missed being given new cases to work every few weeks and she missed shopping. Until she wasn’t allowed to go out, she had never thought she would miss shopping. Browsing stores and finding new outfits had always been one of her favourite past times but she didn’t think it played such a big part in life. Until now. Until all non-essential stores had been closed and they were all on house arrest. Maura was thankful she didn’t have to apply for a slot to do her food shop. She was thankful she didn’t have to fight some middle aged woman for toilet paper or expose herself to a virus that was still so unknown. Even with the daily intel she received from the various scientific journals she subscribed to, it seemed like a smarter idea to stay in her own four walls. Luckily Maura received all her groceries via delivery, unlike so many others who were now desperately trying to secure food delivery slots.

Maura was just aimlessly walking through her apartment as she heard a commotion on the staircase outside. The banging and the muttered swearwords drew her to her door, and she couldn’t help but peek through her peephole. God what had she become? A bored old lady who spied on her neighbours? When she saw the unruly raven curls that darted out from a maroon scarf that had been wrapped around half of the woman´s head, covering most of her face, she smiled. After Jane´s first email they had infrequently exchanged a few messages in the last couple of days and if Maura was honest, receiving a message from the beautiful raven-haired woman made her dull days a little more exciting. She quickly returned to her study, opened her laptop and typed an email:

**From: maura.isles@gmail.com**

**Subject: I spy...**

_"Why don´t you send me a list of things you need and I´ll put them on my next delivery?_

_Maura"_

***

Jane quickly took off her boots as she slipped out of her coat, hanging it up before walking into the kitchen where she had left her laptop this morning. Jane really hoped that the message she had just received was from her beautiful neighbour. The brunette didn’t even bother taking off her scarf, sitting down and immediately opening her email programme that had been on standby while she had been out. The email had indeed come from Maura and a smile spread on Jane´s lips as she read the short message. With flying fingers, she typed her response, not caring what the other woman thought. Not worrying about looking too eager:

**From: jane.maldonado@gmail.com**

**RE: I spy...**

_"Are you spying on me?_

_Jane"_

Jane didn’t have to wait long for Maura´s reply. As only two minutes later her laptop pinged again:

**From: maura.isles@gmail.com**

**RE: I spy...**

_"No. What made you think that? Just couldn’t help noticing your struggle up the stairs...You did make quite a commotion._

_Maura"_

The smile that had spread on Jane´s lips widened a little as she quickly replied:

**From: jane.maldonado@gmail.com**

**RE: I spy...**

_"Alright, Alright. I admit it. I was struggling. Thank you for the offer. Don’t mind me actually taking you up on this. Grocery shopping is a literal nightmare._

_Jane"_

Jane decided it was time to tear herself away from the screen and unpack her groceries. As much as she liked talking to the blonde, Jane had suddenly started to worry that she had indeed seemed too eager. She couldn’t help it though. Jane was missing social interaction. Being undercover was lonely, but the pandemic had added another level to that, but it wasn’t just that. Jane had not felt anything like this in a while. A nervous eagerness to get to know this woman. A tingle when she received an email from the blonde and a craving to get to know Maura better.

***

Maura had come to look forward to the email exchange with Jane and over the next two weeks their emails had become more and more frequent. Jane had taken Maura up on her offer and had actually let her get groceries delivered that Maura dropped off in front of Jane´s door, knocking and then retreating to her own door. The two exchanged a few words when Maura dropped off the food, but their conversations didn’t get to the same level their emails were at. Maura had gotten to know the brunette a little better over the last few days and a thought had formed in her head. What if they formed a quarantine bubble? They had quarantined by themselves for three weeks now so what if, to combat their loneliness, they formed a bubble? Yes, they barely knew each other, but what Maura knew, she liked and so she sat down and typed out an unusually lengthy message.


	12. Bubble

**From: maura.isles@gmail.com**

**Subject: Let´s bubble..**

_"This may sound odd to you and you may think I have gone mad even suggesting this, but I am literally starting to go insane without any real human interaction. Yesterday I realised I was speaking to myself...and if I am honest I did not enjoy that. You have been a delight to talk to through all of this and I find myself utterly looking forward to your emails..._

_So, I was thinking we could maybe form a social bubble...or at least try it out? I mean if we find out we are incompatible in person and really bore each other no harm was done. I wasn’t planning to bubble with anyone else and if I remember everything you told me correctly you haven’t had a chance to make any friends yet, correct me if I´m wrong, because you haven’t been able to meet up with your colleagues or been to the English Department at King´s College yet. I really liked getting to know you a little more and I thought if you felt the same kind of boredom I do, you may want to be in a social bubble with me. Maybe twice a week...or more often if you fancy. If you feel like this is too weird and you´d rather just stick to emailing with me that is fine. If I am too straight forward for your liking and you would rather not talk to me anymore that is fine as well. I will still make sure to get you your food deliveries so please don’t feel pressured into agreeing to form a bubble._

_I also promise I am safe to bubble with, so if you like then come by for dinner tomorrow evening at 6pm._

_Maura"_

Maura had retyped her message four times before she had been happy enough with it and quickly pressed the "send" button. Too scared she would get cold feet and not send it if she went over it one more time. The blonde got up from her chair and began to nervously pace her study, waiting for an answer to her message. As she was walking up and down the room she kept returning to her laptop every few minutes to refresh her email inbox. Half an hour later the blonde shook her head, she had to get out of this room. Her little study was filled to the brim with nervous energy. If she didn’t get her mind off the email soon, she would probably send another email just to check Jane got the first one. Maura shook her head at herself, clearing her head of silly thoughts as she chided herself. How could her neighbour make her feel this self-conscious? After all the raven haired woman hadn’t come close to discovering anything about her that Maura hadn’t readily shared. The blonde had kept Jane in the dark about her profession, only mentioning the hospital once as well as keeping it vague on what exactly she was doing there. To her surprise Jane hadn’t even asked. Jane had never enquired why she hadn’t been at work during a pandemic and Maura was sure to not bring the topic up. If she was honest, she couldn’t even believe her luck that the other woman had been so utterly oblivious. Maura on the other hand knew that Jane had told her a bogus story about how she was an English professor who was on a sabbatical to further her research on Shakespeare. Working on a voluntary basis at King´s College to form new work collaborations and pick other scholars brains had sounded a bit too far-fetched, even if she hadn’t known that Jane was in fact following her. Why Jane was following her and who she was working for Maura didn’t know but she was intent on finding out. Maybe bubbling together to combat her loneliness could serve another purpose. She could find out if the brunette knew anything she didn’t want her to know. After all, it was better to keep your enemies close, especially when the potential enemy was someone as intriguing as Jane Maldonado.

***

Jane wasn’t sure how she felt about Maura suggesting quarantining together. Ever since the email had popped up in her inbox she was torn between nervous anticipation and anxiety. How would she be able to pull off her cover story in person? Maura was smart. She had studied at Oxford for God’s sake. A fact the blonde had shared with her in one of the many email conversations they had had over the past few weeks. They had talked about their childhoods, their college years and the places they had lived in but what if Maura would ask about her work? Maura would see right through her cover story, especially when Jane couldn’t look up whatever she needed to keep up her story. How was Jane ever going to pull off being an English literature professor? She hadn’t been to university or community college. She hadn’t even enjoyed English lit in high school. Reading all these books that had been written by people who had died hundreds of years ago. Stories that weren’t remotely relevant to her life. It wasn’t that Jane wasn’t smart herself, in fact she had been one of the best agents in her class. She just wasn’t good at studying anything abstract. Her courses were always relevant to her job and practical, which had made it easy for her to excel. The blonde, however, was well read. Sudden dread had washed over Jane as she had realised that Maura had actually read a lot of the books Jane had been claiming to study. If one thing had become clear over the last few weeks it was that Maura was in fact a genius. Jane could tell from the way the other woman expressed herself, while sometimes clumsy in person, that she was not only well read but extremely bright.

Jane had been pondering the invitation for two hours now. Maybe she could dodge the topic of work if she did agree to Maura’s dinner innovation. If she was being honest actually talking to a human being sounded nice. Ever since the pandemic had started she hadn’t even been working. There was nothing she could do now that her target was stuck in the house like everyone else. It had become eerily quiet ever since the corpse in London had been found. A new corpse Jane had been left in the dark about for over a week. Only hearing about the bodies connection to her case from her bosses after the Interpol agents working on it had finally shared their intel with them. Their computer forensics team still hadn’t been able to trace any suspicious sums of money so Jane was still waiting and pondering every clue they had found so far. Communications with her team back in Langley had been scarce as no new information came in and she was cut off from any human interaction apart from the emails she exchanged with her mysterious blonde neighbour. Jane was thankful that she had at least received word from her family and knew they were ok, but she missed actually being around them and her friends back home. Being stuck overseas in a pandemic without having the option to talk to the people she loved accelerated her feelings of loneliness and made the brunette immensely homesick. Adding the perks of dinner to the offered company made her decision a no brainer. Having a proper home cooked dinner and not the terrible excuses for dinner she had been whipping up the past few weeks, did sound heavenly, especially in the company of the blonde Jane had been feeling drawn towards more and more. She had justified her blossoming feelings by telling herself over and over again that while she had come here on a mission, the woman she had been surveilling, while close to the target, was not the target. So, getting to know her may not only not be unprofessional but also the right way to finally move in on her target. She wanted to get to know the intriguing woman from across the hall who had showed her nothing but kindness ever since the start of the pandemic and so she decided she would agree to the bubble. She would just have to somehow calm her nerves enough to not say something moronic during their first dinner. Jane really didn’t want to ruin her chances of getting to know Maura or at actually finally having some sort of interaction that resembled normalcy. The brunette craved normalcy.

**From: jane.maldonado@gmail.com**

**RE: Let´s bubble..**

_"To be honest, your idea doesn’t sound that weird to me. You are right, I haven’t been able to meet up with my colleagues or to start with my studies so some sort of distraction would be nice. It has gotten rather boring to be stuck inside and coming to dinner sounds like a nice change for once. I´ll see you tomorrow._

_Jane"_

For the first time in weeks Jane hit send before she could reread the message. For once she didn’t check her spelling or her choice of words as she was too afraid to change her mind. It only hit her a few minutes later. She had agreed to meet with a woman who was a near stranger. A beautiful woman who´s presence had started to make her feel queasy after only following her for a week but still a stranger. Jane wasn’t sure she could suppress the butterflies she had started to feel and be professional if she was actually in the same room, having dinner, with the blonde. She wouldn’t be able to hide behind a paper this time. She would actually have to make conversation without being able to hide behind a screen. Without being able to google a certain book the blonde had mentioned. Without quickly reading Wikipedia articles to fill her knowledge gaps.

"Oh shit!", Jane muttered. She had agreed to this now she couldn’t chicken out. As the realisation that she was actually having dinner with Maura in a little over 24 hours hit her she scrambled to her feet and ran into her bedroom. She had to find an outfit. Having worn nothing but tracksuit bottoms for weeks would make her choice even harder. Jane felt as if she had forgotten how to dress properly. When she had finally decided on a pair of black slacks and a simple eggshell coloured woollen jumper that she didn’t even know she owned, she relaxed. For the rest of the night Jane was sat at her laptop, finding a recipe for focaccia bread she was going to make the next day as her mother had taught her that showing up empty handed to a dinner invitation was rude. So, Jane was going to bake focaccia bread and for once not ruin the bread. She would have to tap into her artistic side, a side she actually didn’t have if she was honest, to decorate the bread with herbs the way her mom had shown her countless of times, but Jane was determined to produce something that may not be as stunning as the focaccia she had grown up with but at least came close. As the hands on her dining room clock advanced to 9pm she took her laptop and settled into bed to read up on at least a few of the works she had claimed to study. Just in case she needed to fill some gaps in her backstory. In case they suddenly did end up talking about work.

***

On the other side of the hallway Maura had been in the kitchen, preparing a light dinner for herself while she was putting a menu together for the next day, when the faint ping from the study had alerted her to Jane´s reply.

The blonde had spent the next afternoon preparing homemade pasta with a seafood sauce as well as chocolate mousse for dessert. Welcoming the change to her usually dull days. A change in her daily routine that exhilarated her. Maura enjoyed cooking, a fact only a few people knew about her, but it always seemed pointless to make elaborate meals for one person. Cooking had always been coined as something a girl in a certain standing wouldn't have to learn and Maura was raised in a household where it wasn't her mother who cooked but a properly trained chef. On the few occasions her mother had discovered the little girl in the kitchen she had scolded her and explained it wasn't her duty to prepare meals. She was expected to become a lady. To manager her future husbands household and staff, not to perform household duties. Due to this sneaking into the kitchen and learning how to cook had been her little secret. As a little girl she had detested the music lessons she was forced to take and had rather spend her time helping around the house, especially in the kitchen. Their chef had taught her not only valuable skills but also how to properly execute difficult recipes. These days the blonde however rarely had the opportunity to try new recipes, which was why she went all out preparing for that evening's meal. 

At exactly 6pm, a knock on the blonde´s door had her hurrying from the kitchen to open it.


End file.
